Ryzen 5 5600X

AMD $549

The best CPU for gaming on a reasonable budget

Everything that’s great about the 5900X rings true for this more affordable Zen 3 chip – you’ll hit the same frame rates in games as you will with our number one pick. Top tier performance from the most affordable Zen 3 CPU? We’ll say yes to that every single day.

It does have half the core count of the 5900X, rolling in as it does with 6-cores and 12-threads, but this is only an issue with more serious workloads, and for more reasonable stuff this is more than sufficient. You could argue that gaming could go beyond the 12-threads we have here, but there’s no evidence of that yet,

and that’s despite the fact that the next-gen consoles are rocking 8-cores and 16-threads.

The Ryzen 5 5600X also bucks the trend of the Ryzen 5000 family by shipping with a Wraith Stealth cooler, so you don’t have to drop extra money on a third-party chiller. You don’t need to, but if you do, you’ll hit higher clocks for longer and also open up the wonderful world of overclocking, which could make it worth your while.

VERDICT

Awesome gaming performance Great value for money Wraith Stealth included